em>State and local governments depend on the private sector for their survival.
Almost every dollar that these governments spend is either borrowed or taxed from
the private economy. Yet, for more than half a century, these governments have continuously
outpaced the growth of the private sector on which they depend.

In the chart below,
Mercatus Center senior research fellow Matthew Mitchell uses inflation-adjusted
data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to illustrate the unsustainable growth
of [US state and local] governments. The blue line shows the size of the
private sector as a multiple of its 1950 value and the red line shows the size of
state and local government spending as a multiple of its 1950 value.